Thirty years ago, “just for a laugh”, actor Peter Gordon wrote a poem for his wife Alison, and left it under her pillow. She liked it, and so he carried on, every day for 25 years. To this day, Gordon continues to add to the thousands of poems he had written for Alison, even after her death four years ago.
“She was quite amused by it, both charmed and flattered, as I had hoped, and I went on from there to turning it into little rhymes and then the rhymes got bigger and bigger and I started doing it every day. So it became a custom,” says Gordon, now 87, from lockdown at his home in Sunbury, where he lives with one of his daughters. “I was out of work sometimes, or hanging about in the dressing room, so it was something for me to do, and something I felt I wished to express quite deeply.”
Gordon met Alison King in 1971, when they were in a play together. They were cast alongside each other again in 1973, and married a year later, having their daughters Cassie and Anna in the late 70s. He dabbled with poetry in the 80s, but it was in the early 90s that he began writing daily verses, often tracing his feelings at being separated from his family on tour.
Alison, who began directing and teaching acting at drama schools in the 90s, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2014. In 2015, in between cycles of chemotherapy, she performed with Gordon in the play Love Letters, directed by their daughter Anna Jordan, a theatre writer and director. Alison died in 2016.
After her death, Gordon began sorting through the thousands of poems left behind, from one written in 1983 that opens “Coming home in the rain / To my home again / My kids, my wife. / The heart of my life,” to 2017’s Spring Without You. The latter begins: “No, it could never be the same – / And yet the cherry tree two doors down / Exploded in pink as if to drown / Our winter blues and put to shame / Old tears.”
“I realised that I had thousands of these pages knocking about in a big wooden box in a shed at the bottom of the garden, and I ought to sort them out, see if they were any good,” says Gordon. “I was quite exercised to find out if they were any good. If I was going to do anything vis-a-vis my wife to show my love, my regret that she’d died, I wanted it to be good, so I was going through them with a fine-tooth comb. I felt that some of them might be considered reasonably good. That was what kept me going.”
Around 300 of the poems now form the basis of the website A Love in Verse, which has been collated by the couple’s daughters, Cassie Davis and Anna Jordan, with help from family friend Lia Burge. It is drawing increasing attention, with friends and actors including Pearl Mackie and Julie Hesmondhalgh recording performances of some of the poems, with the latter taking on The Last I Wrote While She Was Still Alive, in which Gordon ponders on his feelings for his wife on a rainy afternoon: “Who minds getting wet when you’ve got a Rose / A treasure, a pleasure past all dreaming?”
Jordan says the thing she loved most about the poems was “the hope in them … Even those written after my mum’s death – and some of them are really quite devastating – are lifted by the same message: love redeems, even after death. We had to do something with them, to share them with people, and this has been part of the grieving process. I think she’d be very proud of him.”
Gordon is thrilled by the attention the website is receiving. “At my age, suddenly, this has caused a slight stir and it’s very nice,” he says. “I always wanted to be a writer. That was my ambition. I never really got around to it, but I find looking back that I had a tendency to write verse almost willy nilly – it was almost unintentional, it used to get squeezed out of me like a pip.”
He continues to write for Alison, but no longer every day. “Only once every so often. Quite frankly it’s difficult, because it’s quite painful, her loss is still very keen,” he says. “Although there is lots of pain involved, A Love in Verse is ultimately a joyful thing – that I committed all of those hours, all those years, to show my love for her. That expresses it most aptly, I think.”
